


The Strength of the Wolf

by toujours_nigel



Category: Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2012-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-31 04:14:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/339765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky;<br/>And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.<br/>As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back;<br/>For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Strength of the Wolf

> "A curious practice prevails among the tribes in Garhwal and other mountains in the Northern Provinces that would hardly fail to draw terror and distaste into the hearts of even the most hardened officer of Her Majesty's army. As with so many cultural similarities that we confront in unexpected places, one might adjudge this, too, to inhere from the practices first introduced into Afghanistan and the North-Western Frontier Provinces by Alexander the Great—it is generally agreed that the process of bonding wolf and man, without which the modern army is inconceivable, was first practiced among the Greeks, who taught it to the Romans who were then responsible for its dissemination; this theory alone can well account for the widespread nature of this bond, since where there are wolves there are wolfbrothers.
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> However, as is often the case with isolated populations stranded in a sea of strangers, the original Attic methods have undergone the changes that scholars have grown to expect—instead of introducing the wolf-pup to a lad ready for military duty, as is the wont in civilised nations, the tribals instead chose to foster a child between three and five years of age—most usually a boy, though even girls are occassionally chosen for this custom—with the local wolf-pack, trusting to the connections between the village chieftain and the alpha of the pack to see to the upbringing of the child. After an interval of five years, the child is retrieved from the pack and brought back to a home he scarcely remembers save through the pack-memory; his senses have been honed to the limits of his human anatomy—far beyond the capacities bestowed even by military training—and already, at ten years of age the child is ready for initiation into the world of men: the world of hunters is one he has inhabited already for years. The next period of five years—a system the villagers claim inheres through a division of the twenty-five years prescribed as the period of Brahmacharya—is spent in acquiring the skills of manhood, and relearning the skills of human society. Among those who have bonded too strongly with the pack, this period is spent also in relearning language. At fifteen the boy is brought into the hunter's pack and introduced to his wolf, the pup born, as my informer put it “with the boy's name in his howl” and treated henceforth as a man—boy and wolf grow into adulthood together, and neither will take a different mate, any more than an English boy would take a different wolf into his mind should his first precede him into death, but the early familiarity allows a greater comfort to grow between every hunter and his brothers' wolves and thereby adds to the effectiveness of the pack—a trait that can be and has been used in the service of the Crown, most notably in recent memory among the Gurkha Rifles during the Sepoy Mutiny.
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> The advantages of early fostering comes of course with its own great price—should the pack for some reason beyond the understanding of men choose to range to newer hunting-grounds, the fostered children must perforce travel with them or find their lonesome way back to the village over hostile and unknown territory. In the old territory of the Seyonee Pack, a child fostered too young went wandering with the wolves and could only be retrieved at the age of thirteen, nearly too old to be socialised—another year or two and he would have been lost to humanity and all the skills and prowess so painfully acquired gone to waste, as Kipling opines in his severely fictionalised account of the situation. As things stood, however, the boy was brought into recognition of his truer nature—the process of humanisation resembled, so witnesses say, nothing more than the fabled taming of Enkidu, who was, as the reader will recollect, similarly afflicted because of similar causes—and has since been properly integrated into the life of his tribe.
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> As we move from the foothills across the Gangetic Plains, many things change, both in the number of wolf-packs running wild, and in the ways they are fostered with hunters."
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Colonel James R. Thompson, _Wolfbrothers of the Empire: India,_ pp 123-24

 


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